Chapter 89

‘I had twicet as bad—twicet as bad! C’mawn, git the booger put back in place! I got to git back to work! Yarrrr!’ ” We both laughed at her gravel-voiced impersonation. “But then,” she went on, becoming secretive again, “they brought out a needle. Not even very big, but big enough. I knew how he felt about needles and I saw the old fella just go white as a sheet when he saw it coming. But he wasn’t going to let on, you see? 590 ken kesey He was just going to keep up his front. ‘C’mawn, c’mawn, c’mawn; stick me with that outfit so I can get back to business!’ he kept growling. Then, when they did shoot him—after him bein’ so tough and so brave in front of them over his broken bones—he just flinched and made a face. But we heard something; and when I looked over I saw he’d wet all over himself and it was running down his leg all over the floor!” “No! Henry? Oh no, Henry Stamper? Whoo! Oh god . . .” I laughed more than I could remember laughing in years. The thought of his funny surprised face reduced me to a soundless quivering. “Oh god...that’s beautiful, oh my god...” “And...and—oh listen,” she went on in a whisper, “when we went to get him into pajamas—oh listen—after the shot had knocked him out . . . we saw that wetting himself wasn’t all he’d done.” “Oh lord...oh that’s marvelous, I can just see it. . . .” We laughed until we reached that awkward emptiness that follows long laughing, like the emptiness that follows a long roll of thunder; then we were silent again, and uncomfortable, and terribly, deafeningly aware of the thought in both our minds. But what’s the sense in trying? I demanded of myself, staring at the lock of hair which ran like a glowing arrow down the side of her averted face into the neck of her shirt. . . . What’s the sense in dreaming? You can’t make it, that’s all. It’s all part of the way you have worked it out. You should have known all along that the selfsame weapon of weakness that was to win you victory over Brother Hank would be incapable of partaking of the fruits of that victory. You should have known that the spoils which you won from him with limp impotence could never be taken with the same tact. . . . I stood there, then, looking down at this girl’s shy and unvoiced and obvious offering of herself, trying to be philosophic about my organic inability to accept the offer... while the very organ in question rose to refute this newest of excuses and demand with pounding insistence the chance to prove his ability. I stood there, with all obstacles at last removed and nothing separating me any more from my most desirable goal but the space of a few feet—all reasons removed, all excuses exhausted—and sometimes a great notion still that voice in my head refused to let me go: WATCH OUT WATCH OUT, it chanted. But for what? I demanded, almost sick with frustration. Please, tell me; watch out for what! JUST DON’T DO IT, was the reply; IT WILL BE A BAD SCENE. . . . For who? I’m safe, I know so. A bad scene for Hank? Viv? For who? FOR YOU, FOR YOU . . . So, when I had suffered this period of silent standing sufficiently, I sighed and mumbled something about well, it would probably be best—oh, for my cold and all—if I went on in to bed. And she nodded—face still averted—yes, that’s probably true . . . well, good night, Viv ...Good night, Lee; I’ll see you, I guess, in the morning. . . . With her eyes downcast for my cowardice as I slunk from the room. With my stomach sick for failure and my heart dying with shame for an impotence that could no longer even be blamed on impotence . . . (I stopped the pick-up out in front of the hospital, and when I picked up the old man to cart him into the emergency room, I saw his arm had come all the rest of the way off. It dropped out of the ragged sleeve to the street like a snake coming out of its skin. I left it lay. I couldn’t fuss with it now. There is something else, if I could just remember... The night attendant stopped me and started to say something, then looked at the old man. His pencil fell out of his hand. I told him, “I’m Hank Stamper. This here is my old man. A log rolled on him.” And I put the old man on a bed and went over and sat down in a cushioned chair. The attendant was asking questions that I didn’t care about answering. I told him I had to get gone. He said I was nuts, I had to stay till the doc come. I said, “Okay. When Doc Layton gets here wake me up Soon as he gets here. And we’ll see. Now. Take this old man somewhere and give him some blood and leave me alone.” When I woke I thought for a second that no time had passed, that I’d just blinked and that attendant had merely aged and put on about two hundred pounds and was still asking the same questions that I wasn’t hearing yet. When I seen it was the doctor 592 ken kesey I stood up. “Now,” I told him, “all I want to know is do I need to give him some blood?” “Blood? Lord, Hank, what’s wrong with you? You’re in about as much condition to give a pint of blood as he is. What happened out there?” “He’s all right, then? The old man?” “Sit down. No, he isn’t all right, for chrissakes. He’s an old man and he’s lost him an arm. What in the name of god are you trying to rush off to that’s so—” “But he ain’t dead? He ain’t goin’ to die tonight?” “He isn’t dead—Lord knows why—but as far as— What’s the matter with you, Hank? Sit back down there and let me get a look at you.” “No. I got to go. In a minute I will—” I’m late for something, sleeping like that. “I got to in a minute—” In a minute I’ll remember what it is. I pull on my hard hat and feel for cigarettes. “Now,” I say. The doctor’s still waiting for me to explain. “Now, you think he’ll make it?” I ask him. “Is he still out? I reckon he would be, wouldn’t he? Well . . .” I look up at the doctor’s face. What’s his name? Now I know this man, knowed him for years, but I can’t recall his name to save me. “Ain’t it funny how quick you get out of touch?” I say to him “Now. If that’s it, I got to get that pick-up and—” “Well, for chrissakes,” the doctor said to me, “he’s going to drive home. Look here, let me look at that hand, anyway.” It was the cut I’d got working on the jetty some days before; it had opened and was bleeding. “No,” I said slowly, trying to remember what it was I was late for. “No thanks, I can get my wife to tend to that for me. I’ll call you about old Henry in the morning.” I headed out the door. The arm was still laying there on the sidewalk beside the pick-up in a puddle. I picked it up and tossed it in just like it was cord wood. What was it? In a minute I’ll— On the way back through town I stopped at the Sea Breeze to ask where the kid was. “Don’t know,” Mrs. Carleson answered, more sullen than usual, “jest he ain’t here no more.” I sometimes a great notion didn’t feel like pressing it so I walked on up the street to check the bar. No one there had seen him. Before I could leave, Even-write eased up to me and said something at me. I just nodded and told him I didn’t have time to fool with him right then and headed for the door. This Draeger guy was sitting there and he smiled at me and he said hello. He said, “Hank, I feel I should warn you that your casual presence in town is more dangerous to you than you—” “I’m busy,” I told him. “Certainly, but stop a moment and consider—” I walked out along Main. I wasn’t sure where I was headed. In just a minute I’ll remember . . . somewhere I have to go. I went to the Sea Breeze and started to go in and then I remembered that whatever it was I had asked about in there, they didn’t have it. I started back for the pick-up when three guys I never saw before in my life come out of the alley by the grange hall. They pull me back in the alley and go to working me over. I think for a minute, they’re gonna kill me, but then I knew that they weren’t. Some way I knew. They just weren’t working at it hard enough. They took turns holding me against the wall and belting me pretty good, but not like they really aimed to kill me. And I wasn’t really giving them my undivided attention; just a minute I’ll—I was about to sit down and just let them have their way when up the alley came Evenwrite and Les Gibbons and even old Big Newton, hollering, “Hang on, Hank! Hang on, boy!” And I’m damned if they didn’t run off these three other guys and help me up from the ground. Dang, Les said; those must be that bunch of yahoos from Reedsport again, we heard they was spoiling for you . . . and I thanked them and Evenwrite says people got to stick together and I thank him. They help me out to my pick-up. Les Gibbons even says he’ll drive me home if need be. I tell him no, I don’t know that I’m going that way, but thanks just the same, I’m in somethin’ of a hurry to—what? well, in a minute I’ll—I told the boys so long and started the pick-up and headed off, feeling lightheaded and pleasant, floating, sort of. Some of that fever going around, I suspect. But what the devil? it ain’t so bad, a little temperature . . . like Joby always says, accept your lot and swing with 594 ken kesey what you got. And a runny nose is maybe a damn nuisance, but a fever is a cheap drunk . . . driving up Main. It was funny; I felt that there was an errand or something that had slipped my mind in just a little bit I’ll but I was damned if I could remember what, exactly. So in a minute I’ll—I headed out up river, figuring I might as well go home as long as I couldn’t recall what it was I was supposed to see to. I just drove, slow and easy, watching the white lines blink past and the clouds blowing in the moon, not trying to think. And I didn’t recall what was on my mind till I pulled the pick-up up to the garage, and that reminded me of seeing him and I don’t recall all of it till I look out across the moonlit river and see the launch is tied over there now, across the way, and that now there’s two rooms lit over in the house instead of only one . . .) After leaving Viv with her poetry and her disappointment, I went to the bathroom, where I drew out my teeth-brushing as long as possible and spent a good five minutes examining the skin of my face to see how the burn had healed. In my own cold quarters I undressed slowly, putting off getting into bed until the cool of the room forced me between the covers. Finally I turned out the light. The darkness exploded into the room; then, slowly, the moon cast a blue-white beam across my quilt, chilling my cheek and intersecting that thin finger of light that came from the hole in the wall. Have to fill that hole, I thought to myself. I’ll have to fill that hole. Someday soon I will have to do that for good. . . . Then, like that exploding darkness, the shame rose again and surged over me with the same sickening force that had years ago left me with drumming headaches and vomiting ...the same force, years before, in the same bed ...always after (oh God, I had never made the connection before!) always the day after I had watched through that spyhole the passion that I was then, was still incapable of competing with. Now that point of light had found me again. I cringed back into the bedclothes; it seemed to be chopping away at me, at the worthless flesh of me. A scalpel of terrible light, causing actual physical pain! I lay writhing beneath it, feeling no longer shame but only pain. Perhaps when sometimes a great notion shame grows too much for the soul to hold, it expands to sicken the flesh itself with a disease as palpable as cancer, and as deadly. I couldn’t say. Not then. Only that it was a very real hurt and rapidly growing in proportion ...I realized I was crying, not at all silently this time. I clutched my head in time to catch a thunderclap of pain that shook water from my forehead and eyes. I clenched my teeth and rolled groaning into a ball, readying myself for the blow to my stomach. I shuddered with deep, clutching sobs. . . . And it was this way, a whimpering wad of childhood misery under a quilt, that she found me. “Are you feeling sick?” she whispered. She was beside my bed. The pain behind my eyes disappeared at the glimmering sight of her. The sickness in my chest fled instantly before the light brushing of her fingers... Outside, the river rocked between mountain and sea, suspended momentarily between tide and flood, motionless but for a spreading moon-rippled wake. The clouds hurried along, back to the sea. The pick-up eased lightless and quiet into the cavernous garage . . . (When I saw that the launch was gone I don’t know what got into me; you’ll make it across because I decided to swim, rather than call for the boat. You’ll make it. Now from the garage across to the dock in cold water is no slouch of a swim, even when a man is feeling his oats. And I was tired clean through, tired enough I should never have tried. But the funny thing is after I dived in and started swimming I didn’t get any tireder. It took hours, it seemed like, of hard swimming, but I never got any tireder. I was out there and it was like that old river was a hundred miles across—blue-silver, cold—but I knew I would make it. I remember thinking: Look at you: you’ll make it all the way across here when you couldn’t make it up that hill for a air hose for Joby. You’ll make it across here not because you’re strong enough but because you’re weak enough . . .) Then, of course, after she had touched me, we made love. The scene no longer needed the impetus of my contrived plot. I no longer moved the scene; the scene moved me. Quite simply, we made love. (You’ll make it acrosst . . .) 596 ken kesey We made love. How pedestrian the words look—trite, worn, practically featureless with use—but how can one better describe that which happens when it happens? that creation? that magic blending? I might say we became figures in a mesmerized dance before the rocking talisman of the moon, starting slow, so slow...a pair of feathers drifting through clear liquid substance of sky ...gradually accelerating, faster and faster and finally into photon existence of pure light. (Tired and beat as you are, you’ll make it acrosst, you big stud swimmer you . . .) Or I might instead list impressions, images still brilliant, flash-bulbed forever by the white arching of those first touches—the first look after the woolen plaid was parted to show that she wore no brassiere; the slight shy lifting as I pulled the coarse denim from her hips; the supple line starting at the point of her back-thrown chin, pulsing down between her breasts to her stomach spotlighted by that beam from her room ... (You’ll make it acrosst because you ain’t strong enough not to, I kept thinking as I swam. And I recollect this one other thing, a notion that came to me when I climbed out of the water: that there ain’t really any true strength . . . and as I climb the steps: there ain’t really any real strength . . .) Yet it still seems to me I best communicate the beauty of those moments by repeating, quite simply, we made love. And consummated there a month of quick looks, guarded smiles, accidental brushings of body too open or too secret to be mere accident, and all the other little unfinished vignettes of desire ...and, perhaps most of all, consummated the shared knowledge of that desire, and of that returned desire, and of the juggernaut advance of that desire . . . in a silent inward explosion as my whole straining body burst like fluid electricity into hers. Shared, consummated, resolved; in a joyous sprint side by side up the steep slope to the topmost brink, vaulting out . . . the weightless glide...the soaring motionless through light-year distances of skin-tight space; gliding down, gradually back ...to the tick-tock of majority-vote reality, to the timid squeak of bed, to a LISTEN dog barking outside at the voyeur sometimes a great notion moon ...and to the LISTEN WHAT? pressing memory of a strange sodden tread that I thought I had heard WATCH OUT somewhere frighteningly near ages, hours, seconds before! To finally opening my eyes and finding Viv brushed only by the soft, wide stroke of moonlight, and the spotlighting beam from the hole in the wall extinguished! (No, not the strength I always believed in; I kept hearing in my head—not strength like I always thought, I could build and thought I could live, and thought I could show the kid how to live...) The total revelation of what had happened during our lovemaking blasted me so hard I was nearly knocked right back into that outer-space safety of orgasm. I had been confident of my security behind the moat. Positive of it. It had occurred to me that he might return before I was finished. I had half hoped he would. But when he returned he would be across the water. He would honk for the boat. I would take it across to him. Sure, he would be suspicious—me alone there in the house with his woman all those hours—be almost certain, in fact. But almost was all I had planned on. Not on his swimming the river and creeping up the steps like a thief in the night. Not on his actually stooping to spying on me! My Captain Marvel brother, peeking like a pimp through a knothole? Brother Hank? Hank Stamper? Can’t a fella bank on anyone any more? (No, there ain’t any true strength; there’s just different degrees of weakness . . .) I lay paralyzed, with Viv still in a swoon beneath me. One part of my brain was remarking with academic detachment: “So that’s how he used to know I was watching; my room would cast a corresponding beam into the next-door dimness, which went out when interrupted by something solid, like my head. How stupid of me.” While another, louder part kept screaming at me: RUN, YOU FOOL! WATCH OUT! FLEE BEFORE HE COMES FOR YOU RIGHT THROUGH THAT WALL! HELP! WATCH OUT! HIDE! JUMP! ...as though the wall were going to crash at any instant to reveal a swaying lock-kneed monster, myself springing nude out into the cold 598 ken kesey moon and falling to the mud below in a splintering shower of crystal . . . HIDE! WATCH OUT! FLEE! Yet gradually, as the initial shock subsided, I remember being overcome by a gloating sense of remarkable good fortune: sure . . . why, this is too perfect! This could mean victory beyond my wildest dreams, vengeance beyond my wickedest schemes. Shall I? I debated. Dare I? Yes... never give an inch, as they say . . . “Never,” I breathed to Viv before I had a chance to back out. “Never in all my life”—not loud, just loud enough—“have I had it happen like that.” She took the cue beautifully. “Me neither. I didn’t know, Lee . . . so wonderful.” “I love you, Viv.” “I didn’t know. I used to dream . . .” Her fingers traced my spine and came to rest on my cheek. I wasn’t to be distracted. “Do you love me too, Viv?” I could feel the breath stop beyond that wall; I could hear the tunnel roar of listening strained through the hole to catch her whisper. “I love you too, Lee.” “This may sound inappropriate at the time, but I need you, Viv; I love you very much, but I need you very badly.” “I don’t understand.” She paused. “What are you asking?” “I’m asking you to come away with me. Back East. To help me finish school. No. More than that: to help me finish living.” “Lee—” “You said once that perhaps I needed Somebody instead of Something. Well, you’re it, Viv; I don’t know that I can make it without you. I mean it.” “Lee, ...Hank is...I mean I—” “I know you’re fond of Hank,” I cut in quickly; I was into it now and nothing to do but drive on through. “But does Hank need you? I mean, oh, Viv, he can get along without you, and we both know it. Couldn’t he?” “I imagine that Hank,” she mused, “could probably get along without anybody, if it came to it.” “That’s right! He could! But not me. Oh, Viv, listen.” In my fervor I rose to my knees on the bed. “What’s stopping us? Not sometimes a great notion Hank: you know if you ask for a divorce he’ll consent. He wouldn’t hold you here against your will!” “I know that”—still musingly—“he’s too proud to do that sort of thing; he would let me go. . . .” “And he’s too strong to be hurt by it.” “It’s hard to say what hurts him. . . .” “Okay, but even if he is hurt, won’t he survive it? Can you imagine a hurt he wouldn’t survive? He’s arrogated to himself the powers of Superman, and he believes it. But Viv, I’ll tell you; listen. I came out here at the end of my rope. You’ve given me a knot to cling to, to survive with. Without that knot, Viv, I just don’t know, I swear to god I don’t. Come with me. Please.” She lay for a while, looking out at the moon. “When I was a kid,” she began after a pause, “I found a rope doll, an Indian doll. I liked it better than all my other dolls for a while, because I could pretend it was anything I longed for it to be.” The moon stroked her face through the pine bough on the window; she closed her eyes and from the corners tears ran into her pillowed hair....“Now I don’t know what I love any more. I don’t know where the thing I make-pretend leaves off and the thing that’s really there starts up.” I started to tell her that there was no line between the two, but stopped myself, not knowing what make-pretend virtues she had fashioned for my brother. And said instead, “Viv, all I know is that I can’t be noble about this. Only desperate. I need you to live. Come with me, Viv, come away with me. Now. Tomorrow. Please . . .” If she answered my pleading I did not hear her. I was no longer paying any attention to her. My listening, as well as every spoken word, was now directed toward that hole which had suddenly opened again to light. Viv, intent on my words, had not noticed. I started to go on when I thought I detected that same sluggish tread that I had previously heard, moving away from the wall, out of the room . . . into the hall now... now into his room, where he will sit, stricken, on his bed, eyes glassy, hands slack in his lap... all right, Superman; it’s your move.... A thin groan shot down the corridor, followed by peals of 600 ken kesey retching. And another, even sicker groan. “Hank!” Viv lurched sitting with a startled cry. “That’s Hank, what is he—? What’s happened?” Then ran from the room, drawing the wool shirt about her, to find out. I was somewhat slower dressing. My head rang with anticipation and I smiled as I walked the dark hall toward light fanning across the floor from their bedroom door. I knew what had happened: he’s getting sick, losing his lunch. He’s carrying on with moaning and coughing and all the other theatrics traditionally used by children seeking repossession of sympathy. Yes. I knew: an exact duplication of the scene I used to enact, with identical motives and intentions. There was just one thing left now, one short speech, and my overthrow would be complete. I walked slowly down the hall. I was savoring the words I had prepared for what was to be the greatest put-down in history; as my long-ago words had come back to me at the bottom of that postcard this phrase was Brother Hank’s own put-down returning to roost after all these years, like a homing pigeon equipped with the murderous beak of a hawk. “Musta been somethin’ gawdawful rich”—I tried the line half aloud, practicing it for my entrance “to make you so gawdawful sick.” Ah, it was perfect. It was beautiful. And I was ready. I stepped into the room where Viv sat holding to Hank, who had slipped half to the floor in an effort to stick his head into a vomit-covered metal wastepaper basket. His sopping shirt clung to his pathetically shaking shoulders, and the back of his head was matted with river scum. . . . “Well, brother. Musta been somethin’ gawdawful rich,” I incanted ceremoniously, giving the phrase the magical sound afforded words due to effectuate all kinds of miraculous change, “to make you so—” “Oh, Lee, Hank says—” My incantation was cut short, first by Viv, then by the sight of Hank’s head rising and turning slowly to reveal a cheek swollen blue over one eye and lips torn ragged as though by the force of his retching. “Oh, Lee, Hank says that Joe Ben...Joe and the old man . . .”—turning, slowly, until his good eye could fix on me, cold and green with sometimes a great notion knowing—“that Joe Ben is dead, Lee; that Joe’s dead; and maybe old Henry”—mouth opening to a black, guttering tongue and unintelligible words. “Bub—bub—there ain’t, bub—” Viv caught him; “Call the doctor, Lee; somebody beat him all up.” “But there...ain’t any real—” But whatever he was trying to say was lost in more retching. (But if the strength ain’t real, I recall thinking the very last thing that day, before I finally passed out, then the weakness sure enough is. Weakness is true and real. I used to accuse the kid of faking his weakness. But faking proves the weakness is real. Or you wouldn’t be so weak as to fake it. No, you can’t ever fake being weak. You can only fake being strong. . . .) Downstairs, at the telephone talking to the doctor, without thinking of it, I completed my magic words. “How does he look?” the doctor asked. I answered, “Why, Doctor, I would say he looks sick”—adding, without realizing until later it was the end of my incantations, “gawdawful sick”—finishing the phrase, like Billy Batson, gag ripped from his mouth, finishing the last half of a broken “Shazam!” that all-powerful word that would transform Billy, to the accompaniment of lightning and thunder, from a drab and puny runt into that great and all-powerful orange giant, Captain Marvel. “Yes, Doctor...gawdawful sick,” I said. And my bolt of lightning was right on time, spilling suddenly in all the western windows like moonlight through clouds. And my clap of thunder roared deafeningly through the house, echo-chambered from upstairs by a wastepaper basket. Everything was in order. But, unlike Billy’s, my transformation failed to materialize. I don’t know what I expected—perhaps to actually find myself swollen to Captain Marvel magnitude, flying away replete with cape, spit-curl, and neon-orange leotard—but as I stood there, holding the buzzing phone at my side, hearing the overacted melodrama being coughed and sobbed out upstairs, I knew that I had in no way achieved the stature I had subconsciously dreamed that my revenge would bring about. I had very successfully completed my ritual of vengeance; I had accurately mouthed all the right mystical words ...but instead of turning 602 ken kesey myself into a Captain Marvel, as the ritual and words were supposed to do according to all the little-guy-beats-big-guy tradition ...I had merely created another Billy Batson. Then, finally knew what I had been warned to WATCH OUT for. (And if you can only fake being strong, not being weak, then the kid has done to me what I set off to do to him! He’s shaped me up. He’s made me to quit faking. He’s straightened me out.) Suburban survivors of Hiroshima described the blast as a “mighty first boom, like a locomotive followed by a long, loud train roaring past, fading gradually away to a murmur.” Wrong. They describe only the ear’s inaccurate report. For that mighty first boom was only the first faintest murmur of an explosion that is still roaring down on us, and always will be. . . . For the reverberation often exceeds through silence the sound that sets it off; the reaction occasionally outdoes by way of repose the event that stimulated it; and the past not uncommonly takes a while to happen, and some long time to figure out. ...And the citizens of the little West Coast towns, not infrequently, needed some time to even begin recognizing that it had happened, let alone to get around to figuring it out. For this reason their centennials are never a great success—many oldtimers from bygone times are reluctant to admit those times are gone by. For this reason a nondescript bog in a meadow is still called Boomer’s Ferry...though Mr. Boomer, his cable-drawn ferry, and the wide slough that once floated them, have long since sunk into nondescript mud. For this reason it takes almost a day after the rain has stopped in Wakonda for the men to straighten up out of their hump-shouldered shuffle, almost a day after the wind has quit whipping the water before the women remove the newspaper calking from beneath doors. After one whole rainless day they are willing to say that it by god might be clearing up at that, after a rainless day and night the men and women are even compelled to go so far as to admit that it has stopped, but it takes the mentality of a child to think that the sun might actually come out, here, in November, right in the dead of winter. 604 ken kesey “Look: the old sun might come out, and it almost Thanksgivin’. How come? It never did that before . . .” “Old sun is gonna come out to look is how come...to see is it springtime yet,” was how the phenomenon was interpreted by a Siuslow Street Grade School meteorologist in galoshes and mud-daubed tresses. “To see if it is time to have springtime is how come...” “Ain’t,” a junior colleague, behind her one whole grade and a boy at that, had the gall to dissent. “Ain’t it a-tall.” “The ol’ rain some way quit rainin’, see, an’ the sun he waked up an’ he says, ‘It quit rainin’...maybe time for spring. I better see....’ ” “That ain’t it,” he kept on, “that ain’t it a-tall.” “And so,” she went on, ignoring him, “and so . . .” She drew a deep breath and lifted her shoulders in a gesture of bored certainty. “...the ol’ sun is simpah-lee come sneaking out to see what time it is.” “No. That . . . just ...ain’t ... it. Not a-tall.” She tried to remain silent, knowing it was best not to dignify these sillies by replying, but the mysterious measured tone of his statement, suggesting knowledge of other data, had anticipated and cleverly baited that silence. The muddy meteorologist detected a vacillation of faith in her audience—too much vacillation to simpalee ignore. “All right, smarty-pants!” She turned on him. “You tell us how come there’s sunshine out an’ it almost Thanksgiving.” Smarty-pants, a big-nosed, big-eared skeptic in taped-together eyeglasses and a screaming Nylaglo raincoat, raised his eyes and looked gravely up at the seminary watching him from the creaking merry-go-round. They waited. The pressure was on. There was no two ways about it: he’d opened his mouth one time too many and now he had to put up or shut up, and he was going to have to put up some extremely persuasive logic to overcome the girl’s lead, for not only was she backed by some pretty sound argument and her own bright red Frisbee, which she tossed and caught at unpredictable intervals; she was a second-grader to boot. He cleared his throat and called on authority to help make up the gap. sometimes a great notion “My daddy said last night, my daddy said...that it’s gonna be clear sonofabitchin’ skies now that the sky’s cleared.” “Poot!” She wasn’t one to fall for a closed argument. “But how come?” “Because—my daddy said—” He paused, kneaded his brow to recall the verbatim beauty of the reason, darkening his countenance and simultaneously building suspense with a devastating sense of timing. “Because—” His face cleared; the old memory had come through once again. “That hardnosed Stamper bunch is finally knuckled under, is what.” He delivered the clincher. “Because that sonofabitchin’ Hank Stamper is fine-a-lee called off his deal with Wakonda Pacific!” Right on cue the sun slid above a cloudbank, sharp, keen, and freshly bright, to illuminate the playground with an icy white glare. Without another word the girl turned and galoshed off toward the swings, whipped and knowing it; it was a great loss of prestige, but there was simply no way to dispute the statement of authority when it was being seconded by the actual appearance of the party in question. No, she was forced to bow to the truth: the sun had come out because of the capitulation of the Stampers, not because it suspected an early spring. Though, in fact, it did seem very much like spring. Dying dandelions woke to that keen-edged sun and managed a last bloom. Beaten grass lifted straight. Meadowlarks sung in the cattails. And by noon of that second rainless day the town was so thick with the warm, steamy air of Oregon springtime that even the adults recognized the presence of that sun. The sun tried to draw off some of the moisture that had gathered in its brief absence. The roofs steamed. The walls steamed. The railroad ties in weed-grown fields steamed. In Swede Row off Nahamish Street, where the fishermen lived, their drab shacks, primerless and paintless and soaked through and through, gave off such a cloud of hissing silver mist that the whole row appeared to have caught fire from the unexpected arrival of the November sun. “Bitchin’ weather, don’t you say?” said the Real Estate Man on the South Main sidewalk as he strode, with his coat over his shoulder and good times just around the bend, beside Brother 606 ken kesey Walker of the First Pentecostal Church of God and Metaphysics. He drew a great lungful of optimism, puffed out his chest to the sun like a chicken drying its feathers, and repeated, “Bitch-ing.” “Ah.” Brother Walker was not very enthusiastic about this particular description. “What I mean is”—damn these guys make a guy feel like he can’t let go and talk American—“is this kind of climate in late November is truly extra-ordinary, extra-ordinary, don’t you agree?” Brother Walker smiled. That was better. He nodded.... “The Lord is merciful,” he announced with confidence. “You bet!” “Yes, yes, merciful . . .” “Big times coming,” was the Real Estate Man’s evaluation. “We’re out of the woods; around that old corner.” He was tingling with joy and ease; he thought of all the little Johnny Red-feathers he had carved recently, how their faces had grown so like Hank Stamper’s that he had almost gone bats. Now all that was over. And just in time. “Yep. Prosperity round the bend... now that everybody’s been set to rights.” “Yes ...the Lord is merciful,” Brother Walker said again cheerfully, adding this time, “and eternally just.” They strode on down the puddled walk, a dealer in dirt and a peddler of sky, chance comrades for a while because of their shared destination and their corresponding views of destiny, both beaming their brightest and dreaming of great transactions of earth and air—tingling and cheerful, real pinnacles of optimism, masters of the bright outlook ...but still only amateurs compared to the dead man they were on their way to bury. At the parlor Lilienthal studies old snapshots and adds last hurried touches to make this loved one look just as natural as life. He wants everything in this ceremony to be especially just as natural, so the kin won’t object to the bill: the bill is padded heavily to cover the loss he took the day before by burying that miserly Willard Eggleston and the poor old drunk who used to cut shingle bolts; a ranger had found the old man passed on in sometimes a great notion his shack and brought him in, and a coroner is legally bound to attend to such deceased finds, though the poor souls are without a relative to their name and have been passed-on for a week.... So Lilienthal takes extra pains and special efforts with this loved one, partially to pay for, partially to make up for, the treatment that other hunk of rotten meat received yesterday.... At her shack on the clamflats Indian Jenny sits on her cot in a position as close as she can come to the full lotus. She has been meditating ever since the news of the accident reached her; now she is stiff and hungry and she suspects that a family of earwigs has taken up residence in the back of her skirt. But she waits, motionless, and tries to think as Alan Watts told her to think. Not that she has much hope any longer of solving her problem by this method; mainly she is just dallying: she just doesn’t want to go into town yet for further news. Further news, she has realized since hearing of the developments up river, cannot possibly be anything but bad news ...and she doesn’t know which will dismay her most, hearing that Henry Stamper still lives or hearing that he has died. She closes her eyes and redoubles her efforts to think of nothing, or almost nothing, or at least of nothing as unpleasant as her aching thighs, or Henry Stamper, or earwigs . . . At the Wakonda Arms, Rod looks up from his newspaper to see Ray come buck-and-winging through the door with his cheeks glowing and his arms filled with green-papered bundles. “Puttin’ on my white tie...gettin’ out my tails.” Ray tumbled the load onto the bed. “Fish and soup, Roderick my man, fish and soup this p.m. Cash, too. Teddy paid, after nearly two months; it’s a drag that poor little Willard wasn’t around to enjoy the event, after bugging us about our cleaning bill for so long. Too bad, Willy-o; you’d of waited a few days, you could of split fulfilled.” He clicked into his dance step again, skipping over to the chest of drawers. “But look here, I got to get hold of the old ax. Come to daddy, baby; I got to get the old phalanges limbered....” Rod watched from the bed as Ray pulled the guitar case from beneath the chest of drawers. He gave up on his paper, but for all Ray’s buoyant good tidings, he decided to hold his finger on 608 ken kesey his place in the want ads. “What you coming on so about?” he asked as Ray began tuning the instrument. “Hey! Did Teddy finally agree about upping our cut?” “Nope.” Ting ting ting. “You heard from that moneypockets uncle of yours? Huh? You heard from Rhonda Ann in Astoria? Damn you, if you and her—” “Nope, nope, nope-a-dope.” Ting ting ting-a-ting. “Baybee! does a change in weather like this screw up the ol’ strings.” T-eeng t-eeng. Rod rolled to his hip and spread the newspaper against the sun streaming through the dust-starched curtains, returning to the want ads. “Then if you’re tuning that outfit planning a gig tonight, you might’s well figure on pickin’ lead and bass both. ’Cause man I mean screw it. I’m not taking it ...ten bucks a night and no tips for a month, I don’t hafta take that sound and I told Teddy so.” Ray looked up from his tuning, his face a wide grin. “Man... tell you what I’m gonna do: just because I’m such a sterling fellow, tonight . . . you can have the whole ten and I’ll be happy with the tips. Cool?” No answer came from beneath the paper, but a suspicious silence. “Cool, then, okay? Because I tell you, Roderick. There’s things you ain’t heard and veins you ain’t got your fingers on; it’s gonna be tips up the geetus from here on out and loot and luck all the way to Nashville. Hoo-hoo! I don’t know about you, but I’m goin’ to the moon, you sour-mouthed pessimist. To the moon. Dig?” From beneath his paper the pessimist remained silent, digging only that the last time Ray came buck-and-winging into a hotel room to go to coming on like this the nut had ended up, instead of in Nashville, on the emergency ward in a stinking little hospital outside of Albany or Corvallis or someplace like that, with a hose down his big mouth after a fistful of Nembutals. “Get up from there, man,” Ray shouted. “Get shuckin’. Get out your machine an’ let’s get the kinks loose. Get your chin off your chest and get on the sunny side of the street and pack up your troubles. . . .” Chang: C-chord. Chong: F, G-seventh, sometimes a great notion G...“ ’Cause, man, it’s—” Chang: C-chord again and “Blue skies, smilin’ at me . . . nothin’ but blue skies—” “For maybe one or two days.” A voice rose from the want ads and clouded the air with dismal forecasts of approaching low fronts. “For maybe one or two crummy days, then what kind of motherin’ skies?” “Go ahead.” Ray grinned. “Sit there under a paper and rot. This boy’s gonna get his pickin’ and strummin’ hand sharpened up and take it straight to the top. Tonight’s the start. Sweet joy and victory is gonna fill the old Snag tonight, you see if it don’t. Because, man”—chang tink a tink—“Nothin’ but blue skies . . . do I skooby-dooby see E E E . . .” In the Snag, Teddy looks at the blue sky through his cold scribble of neon and has a slightly different reaction to the unusual change in weather.... Blue skies isn’t barroom weather. You need rain for bringing in the drinkers; this kind of day people drink lemonade. You need rain and dark, and cold. . . . That’s the stuff to start the fear running, to keep the fools drinking. He’d been concerned with fear and fools ever since Draeger had told him with a wink the day before that Hank Stamper had just called to say that the shooting match was done. “The ‘shooting match,’ Mr. Draeger?” “ ‘The whole by god shooting match,’ as Hank put it. He said that because of ‘developments,’ Teddy, he couldn’t see how he could possibly make his deadline. Developments . . .” Draeger grinned proudly at him. “I told you we’d show these muscle-heads, didn’t I?”